A method of estimating the underlying input–output relations for beef cattle from large-scale experimental trials

Abstract

SUMMARYThe Agricultural Research Council's system of feed evaluation provides a method of predicting the most profitable ration composition, given information about available feedingstuffs and the values of the parameters in the beef-feed production functions. Because these functions are non-linear, parametric estimation based on average data for a group of animals will give biased results. A method of determining unbiased estimators of the parameters is derived and the magnitude of the bias is shown to be small. Some simplifications of the ARC formulae are proposed.